


Carved Desk

by SeventhAgent



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Boss/Employee Relationship, Drinking, Grief/Mourning, Horror, Implied Sexual Content, Office Party, Other, POV Second Person, Surreal, The Commissioner Did A Great Job, Unhealthy Relationships, Yearning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:33:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27504622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeventhAgent/pseuds/SeventhAgent
Summary: The commissioner is doing a great job! That is, the new one. The old one...ah, our new commissioner is trying not to think about that. Please do not disturb him in his office as he hunches over that old dark desk. There is most assuredly no tragic queer yearning here, so just stay out!
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6





	Carved Desk

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe that I've done this. I blame the Game Band for everything. EVERYTHING. I WAS DONE WITH FANFICTION I'M A COOL ADULT WITH A JOB NOW AND A WRITING CAREER AND YET YOU'VE DONE THIS TO ME AND ALL IN A GOOFY DISCORD LAWSUIT SUBPLOT IM
> 
> IM FINE!!! IM NORMAL!!!!!! THINGS ARE NORMAL!!!!! SHUT UP!!!!!!!

Look at you, fucker, drumming your fingers on a big, black desk that isn't yours. Thousands of fingernail marks on it.

I mean yes, surely you should be happy for your glorious new promotion (let us all take a moment to appreciate the unknowable Gods of Blaseball who bestowed this upon you, or at least those gods who have yet to be destroyed) but you do know this desk. You have placed coffee upon this desk. In fact, you have dreamed about this desk.

Workplace dreams, obviously! Don't get, like, weird about it? Most of these dreams concern coffee, which you dutifully brought to, you know, to _him_ every day at least once, usually many times, because capitalism loves caffeine babyyyyyyyyyyyy. And in these dreams, you looked at Parker and reached out with your gaze to pluck something from his eyes. Some gleaming thing, some flash of life in the man who you've seen hunched and annihilated by work and anxiety and power. You pull it from the pool of Parker's eyes and you stick it in your mouth and you eat it.

He smiles at you, and the smile is so wide, and he begins to cry. He says "thank you."

Pretty much a normal work dream.

You knew Parker fairly well, I'd say, because that's how it goes when you're an assistant. Parker was an assistant too back in The Day (he said to you once, a few beers into a work party) and he sure didn't like it! You laughed at that. There weren't enough cups for the next drink, so you both rolled excess flesh into cones and poured the drinks into them. Regeneration is a bitch, but that's office life. You went in for a toast but Parker looks distracted. Is he okay? You asked. He blinked. He was staring out at the Void for a minute.

"You're not supposed to do that," you said

"uh," he said.

"Because of all the bites and stuff."

"yeah i know, i don't know what you're talking about."

Because at once there isn't a void, and the two of you were surrounded by unnamed coworkers, and two of those coworkers were partying a little _too_ hard so it was up to Parker to break things up or management (no, the other management) would get real mad about it.

That night, before you self-digested in your chrysalis in preparation for the next day, you visited Parker in his office. He's leaning on that desk of his. Big and black and covered with fingernail scratches. Once, at a different party with Parker (one that the two of you never talked about although you saw it in that eye-glint) you stood over his half-asleep body and wandered his office. In the end, you did fall asleep on his desk--you were looking at the marks on the desk and got lost there--tens of numbers, hundreds of names, thousands of stories on a single black wooden desk. You recognized Parker's handwriting, rough though it was, and tried to decode his numbers based on stories he told you:

1.) when he came out to his parents. ran out, spent the night in an insect girlfriend's skittering car sobbing into a blaseball glove.

2.) when he joined the league and exhaled something blue and irretrievable. something unseen drank the exhalation. it felt good. it felt like always.

3.) a story that could not have happened, with...uh. with...goku? okay, no, what? let's do that one again. surely, you thought, that couldn't have happened...and (technically) you were right.

3 (but really).) when he was looking at his schedule for the next few months and saw something Very Unpleasant--and we'd "cross that bridge when we came to it"--and with a shaky nod you saw him go back to his corner office and (through the glass window, how is it fair that they get glass windows?) begin to sob uncontrollably into the scarred black desk. he whispered unfamiliar names into the wood. rubbed his eyes and whimpered. and

3 (still) you looked through the glass of the window and met his eyes for a moment, and Parker...he was terrified, because he was a person and he wasn't supposed to be. Both of you looked superstitiously at the Blaseball Stat Sheets (TM) on the wall to ward off personhood, but the ritual failed and again there were (unfortunately) locked eyes and accompanying personhood. So...

3 (yet again) you knocked on the door and he opened it like everything was cool and you sort of. Talked? He wanted to say more, you know he wanted to say more, but he was a person at you and let you be a person back. And above you, the Blaseball Stat Sheets (TM) watched and probably disapproved, but that could be okay tonight. He was crying, you see. And there was the fact that--and you didn't like it, really, true or not--but it was a fact--there was the fact that

you loved him and

his eyes were so raw and

haunted.

You both knew well how useless you were when it happened, how meager this hierarchy was--two different sorts of underlings--but it did happen, all soft and warm. Had to pull down some Blaseball Stat Sheets (TM) to clean up. He was good but you know enough to know that you were better.

All of these things you can see in the dark, scarred desk that is now yours. All of these moments are quantifiable, as all moments are, and a new arithmetic has been burned into your mind to allow their glory. Parker IIII. Congratulations.

Slowly at first, you reach your jagged fingernails across your new black desk and begin to carve your love.


End file.
